


I just wanna be your lover, girl

by ask_the_birds



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gay spinoff of season three, Happy Ending for Everyone, Lesbian Max, Lesbian awakening, M/M, Summer, also he and el are best friends, angsty, bisexual el, but silly, internalized/period-appropriate homophobia, robin is a mentor, theyre sort of dumb, will is gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 19,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23242402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ask_the_birds/pseuds/ask_the_birds
Summary: Summer 1985. Max has a boyfriend, albeit one she isn’t so sure she wants to kiss, and  friends, and a certainty that she is on the right track for the first time ever. The only thing she doesn’t have is Eleven. Not like THAT.  That came out wrong. The only thing she doesn’t have is Eleven’s friendship. And she’s not sure why that’s bothering her so much.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper/Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 29
Kudos: 119





	1. Max

“I don’t think she likes me.”

“Who?” Lucas asked, clearly distracted, though by what Max couldn’t say. As far as she could tell they were watching a movie, but Max was pretty sure that Lucas, as her boyfriend, was supposed to be watching  _ her. _ That was what the boyfriends in California did. At least she was pretty sure. Her friends back home certainly claimed that was what was supposed to happen.

In any case, Lucas clearly wasn’t paying attention, and Max thought this was a very important subject.

“El,” Max said. “Eleven. I don’t think she likes me.”

“She likes you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. How could someone not like you?”

Lucas sounded so distracted as he said it that Max was not inclined to believe him. She narrowed her eyes and pinched his arm, making him flinch into the person next to him. He turned with a scowl and hushed them both.

“What was that for?” Lucas hissed.

“You’re not paying attention. This is a big deal.”

“What do you mean?”

Max opened her mouth, flailing to articulate why this was bugging her so much. The truth was, she was finding it hard to define herself. She didn’t know  _ why  _ she was so obsessed with the idea that El secretly hated her. It was just a nagging worry whenever they all got together. It was distracting and exhausting, and Max was getting tired of seeing the back of El’s head all the time.

“I don’t know. We’re both girls, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“And everyone else is a guy. So shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, gal pals? Girlfriends?”

Lucas snorted at her choice of words, and Max blushed. “You know what I mean.”

“I think you worry too much.” Lucas turned himself back towards the movie and picked up a single piece of popcorn. For all his supposed manliness, Max couldn’t help but notice that Lucas could be delicate sometimes. Eating his popcorn one piece at a time. Plus he screamed like a girl.

Lucas didn’t have to worry about El liking him. He and El were bosom buddies at this point- they had survived two apocalypses together. Max felt sort of pathetic in comparison, especially considering how El could single-handedly destroy monsters and kill people and shit and all Max could do was scream and linger in the background. Maybe that was why Max wished they were closer- she felt so unworthy that she needed El’s approval. That thought made her feel gross, though. It wasn’t about that.

The movie boomed on, and Max glanced at Lucas, watching the light from the screen play over his face. He smiled at something the characters said; he looked so boyish. 

So many things were changing right now. Summer was creeping up hot and thick on the horizon- Max’s first away from California. She had a boyfriend, for the first time in her life. She also had friends she could stand, friends she even sort of liked. And Billy was leaving her alone, just like she’d always wanted.

Why was she so bothered by this one detail?

“Max,” Lucas said, and Max registered that he was looking at her. “If you really want to get to know El, then get to know her. She’s not as scary as she seems.”

“I know-”

“If you guys hung out, I think you’d get along. And she  _ definitely _ wouldn’t hate you..”

Lucas smiled at her, and Max was reminded why she was doing this. Why she was sitting here in the dark with this boy, being a  _ girlfriend _ . Sometimes she forgot how much she liked Lucas, and the moments when she did were such a relief. They were like the universe patting her head and saying  _ you’re not making a mistake. You’re who you’re supposed to be, right now. _

And if she wanted to…

She could lean over and kiss him. She’d done it twice: once at the school dance last winter, once a few months ago. She could imagine their lips meeting, and the taste of popcorn in her mouth.

Instead, Max smiled at him and turned back to the movie, hoping he didn’t notice her blushing. She was just taking it slow, she reminded herself. It was fine that she didn’t want to make out with him at any given opportunity, okay that she wasn’t the throbbing ball of hormones and lust that the girls in her mom’s magazines were. 

Everything was absolutely okay with her.

Kissing was off-topic. Max’s mind circled back to El, and the rest of the movie was ruined

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first fan fiction attempt! The storyline storyline starts in the next chapter.  
> Btw I know NOTHING about the eighties beyond like “Madonna, swatches, mall, sparkly piano chords” so if you spot any wild inaccuracies that’s why.  
> Thanks for reading!


	2. El

El was kissing a boy, again.

The light was warm and yellow, and the air smelled kind of sweet. The boy was Mike; it was always Mike. His hands were in her’s, strong and warm and familiar, and when she looked at the scenery over his shoulders it was lush and green. Summery. 

El was very excited for summer. Last year, summer was sweltering and cramped inside Hop’s cabin, but El was aware that this year would be different. Everything was going to change this summer. First of all, Mike. That was the most important thing. 

Mike as an idea was not changing this summer. Last year, El had thought about him every day, almost, especially when she listened to him call her. That had been a sad version of Mike, though. Whenever she thought about him, she wanted to cry. This summer’s Mike would be happy. This summer’s Mike would be perfect.

Mike was perfect! Mike was good, and he was sweet. He was kissing her, right then.

He broke away. They were in Hop’s cabin, or on the porch at least, and the light was getting dimmer and dimmer through the trees. That meant that being-with-Mike time was over, and being-with-Hop time was about to start. El used to mind it, but now she thought it was a pretty good deal. Besides, Mike promised that when summer vacation started, they could be together all day. Maybe they could go out with the others even more; so far they’d barely been able to meet five times. Summer promised parties. It promised double dates. It promised fun fun fun! (El had assembled her summer plan from TV shows and advertisements, which gave her a pretty solid idea of how sunbaked and sparkly the summertime was going to be).

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mike said, stepping away from her. Their lips disconnected, and El resisted the urge to wipe hers with the back of her hand (that usually made Mike look vaguely upset).

“See you.”

“12:00, okay? Dustin’s going away party.”

“Okay.”

Mike grinned and grabbed his bike. He was tall, but still thin as ever. El thought that Mike was probably never going to look like the sweating, muscled men on television. He’d probably never look like Hop. But El liked him gangly.

Sometimes, when El was looking at him, she got sad. She wanted to preserve him, stop him where he was so he wouldn’t grow out and away. El felt unchanged, or at least slower than Mike, and she didn’t want to be left behind. Wherever they went, she wanted them to go together.

Eternal was a word she had recently learned. She thought it could apply.

Mike biked away. El watched him for a little bit, then went inside.

The cabin was dull with no one inside. The lights were a little too bright and yellow, and sometimes the corners scared El a little bit. Not that she couldn’t protect herself. She didn’t actually understand that fear.

She sat on the couch, and turned on the TV, but she was feeling bored and fidgety, so she went into her room instead and turned on the radio. The randomness of the two sounds amused El vacantly, so she turned both up to their max volume and listened to them fill the cabin. She didn’t hear Hop come in, and so it was shocking when he switched the TV off.

“What are you doing?” he asked, sounding loud but not mad (El had learned the difference). He looked confused, and El shut off the radio too. Static silence resumed. 

El shrugged. “Bored.”

“Right,” Hop said. He went to the fridge and got himself a beer, while El put the radio back in her room. Sometimes, El would do something and she only realized it was weird when Hop came home and gave her his wide-eyed, ‘what do I do now?’ look. Mike said that he thought that Hop panicked because he didn’t know what was normal either.

“Can you come in here, please?” Hop called from the other room, and El came in. Hop was sitting at the table, setting up dinner. So, El was standing in her room for longer than she’d thought. Sometimes, that happened. El was pretty good at making time go by.

“What’s up?” El asked. She said it the way the boys did, in an imitation of Max’s ‘California accent’. El didn’t get it, but it was amusing to watch Dustin and Lucas stagger around calling people ‘dude’. 

“So, remember Joyce saying she wanted to look for a new house?” Hop asked, pushing her plate over. He rubbed his hands. “God, I’m starving.”

“I remember.”

“Well, her sister, in Illinois, wants her to come take a look at the area.”

El nodded, assessing her meal. Peas. She didn’t like peas. She started in on the chicken.

“And Joyce is worried her car might give out, plus Jonathan needs it for his job this summer, so she asked me if I maybe wanted to take a little road trip with her.”

El looked up. She knew what a  _ road trip  _ was. A  _ road trip _ did not fit in with her idea of a perfect summer.

“And, you know, a lot of people in town would, uh, understand her situation. So I said I’d think about it.” Hop scratched at his face, looking slightly sheepish. El could’ve gone without the excuses- she knew Hop loved Joyce Byers. She knew it from a glance, when a panicked Hop had driven her down to the cabin that winter because he hadn’t known what to do about El’s fever. Watching his eyes go soft and tender as Joyce made soup in their little kitchen was enough to know. 

“But I know you were excited to be here for the summer,” Hop said.

“Yes.” El took a sip of her water. “I’ll stay here.”

“Kid, I can't just leave you at this cabin by yourself.” Hop dabbed his mustache with a napkin. El eyed him skeptically.

“I’ll stay with Mike,” she said.

It was like a wall slammed behind Hop’s eyes. “No.” His voice was harsh, hateful.

“Hop!” El cried indignantly.

“Do you have any  _ girl  _ friends who can take you for the next few weeks?” Hop asked, cutting his chicken resolutely. El scowled and folded her arms.

“I stayed with Mike before.”

“Yeah, well you live under me roof now, so,” and here Hop took a bite of chicken, “ _ my rules _ .”

“That’s unfair.”

“You don’t have a single girl friend?”

El flushed. “I do.”

“And could you arrange an extended sleepover with her?” Hop asked. When El didn’t answer, he sighed. “Listen. I’m trying to do you a favor. It’s either friend, or you can come with me. What’s it gonna be?”

El glowered for a few seconds, arms tightly folded, but then she exhaled. He was right- Hop was rarely this cooperative, and El’s summer was in jeopardy.

It was just  _ Max. _

Was Max even El’s friend? They’d talked, briefly, and they were in the same party, but El wasn’t sure that made her a friend. Plus, there was still a dull jealousy at the thought of her and Mike laughing in the gym…

But Max wouldn’t say no, would she? Mike said that Max was nice. Lucas was dating Max. Max would be kind and let El live at her house for a few weeks.

“Fine,” El said. “I’ll stay with Max.”

Hop raised his eyebrows. “And Max… is a girl?”

“Yes!” El said, slamming to her feet. “You have fun on your  _ road trip. _ ”

As she stomped towards her room, she felt a balloon of sadness filling her chest. After all, she didn’t want to go Hop-less. That was not a perfect summer. But El could still salvage it. She would just have to talk to Max tomorrow, and it could all begin.


	3. Max

Dustin’s going away party wasn’t much of a party. 

It felt more like what they would do any day, meaning hanging out in Dustin’s kitchen, admiring his weird technological inventions (“It should be able to fly!” Dustin told them as they swept up the broken pieces of his latest) and eating whatever miscellaneous food combinations his mom cooked up. And waiting on Mike and El practically the whole time.

They perched on Dustin’s couch, watching Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back for the billionth time with Dustin’s running commentary, and Max broodily chewed her ice cream cake (obviously homemade, and more like a melty ice cream sandwich then a cake). 

So here’s the thing: Max had been preparing how to casually insert herself into an El-related conversation all night. She had topics prepared (“so, the Upside Down thing sure was crazy last halloween!” and “what’s your favorite color?”) and she had practiced smiling, making sure to squint her eyes and show just the slightest hint of teeth. So, in theory she could talk to El. But it was going to be hard to get between the constant Mike-and-El sandwich. Like, who knew two people could hold hands that much?

As if she had summoned them, the doorbell rang. Dustin’s mom called, “stay where you are!” and hurried to get it. No one else reacted except Will, who of course looked freaked out. Then again, Max had never seen Will  _ not  _ freaked out. At this point, all she could say she knew about the kid was “loud noises and darkness and people scare him often”. And his hair. Scared, and hair: that was Will.

As she suspected, it was Mike and El, who walked in  _ already  _ holding hands. Max decided not to roll her eyes.

There wasn’t enough room on the couch for them both; Max opened her mouth to invite El to come sit next to her, but they both sat on the floor, next to Will. Dustin didn’t pause in his analysis to greet them.

Suddenly, things were exactly as Max had  _ not planned.  _ She was looking at the back of El’s head. Not that it was a bad view. Max had always admired El’s hair, which looked soft and manageable and pretty. Like, how was that fair? The universe bestowed upon her world-saving abilities and then decided to throw in great hair as an extra treat. Max had never even seen her get zits.

The movie passed. Max stared so long at the back of El’s head she began to worry that El could sense it with her psychic powers. But, if she did, she decided not to acknowledge Max at all. So that was sort of annoying. 

Eventually, El shifted and stood. She said, something to Mike, so quietly that Max didn’t catch it, and then turned and walked away from them. Max was stunned to see that her hand looked normal; for some bizarre reason she had imagined it would have shrunk, like when someone wore a ring for a long time. In a daze, she watched her go.

Then it dawned on her: a perfect opportunity.

“Bathroom,” Max said to Lucas, and vaulted over the arm of the couch. She felt strangely electrified, and nervous, and that made her so furious that she really didn’t have a choice but to follow her.  _ She’s just a girl _ , Max reminded herself. When had she  _ ever  _ been afraid of girls?

El was in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of sprite. She was so precise about it, Max noticed, her eyebrows practically furrowed as she watched the liquid splash into the cup. Max stood there, waiting for her to finish.

When she did, El turned fully around like she was expecting her, and their eyes met for the first time in… months, maybe. Max was struck by how young her face looked: she had big brown eyes and a tiny pink mouth. Like a flower fairy or whatever.

“Hello,” El said. Her voice was nice, too. Quiet. Max swallowed.

“Hi,” she said. 

They stood there, looking at each other.

“Do you need the Sprite?” El asked, and stepped aside so Max could have open access to the bottle. Max shook her head, then wished she’d nodded it. Why else had she come to the kitchen?

El seemed like she wanted to ask the same thing, but instead she asked, “could I stay at your house?”

“What?” Max asked.

“Your house,” El clarified, or, rather, further confused her. “Could I… stay there?”

“Why?” Max asked. She was suddenly very aware of how monosyllabic her responses were, and cleared her throat. “I mean, sure. If you wanna have a sleepover…”

“Hop…” El paused and looked at Max, waiting for her to give some facial recognition that she knew who Hop was. Max nodded, and El continued, “is going on a road trip. He says I can’t stay with Mike.”

Then she looked at Max expectantly. Like, how was she even supposed to interpret that?

“So you want to stay with me?” Max asked.

“You’re a girl.” El didn’t look happy as she said this, and her face set into a sort of ridiculous little pout. Max blinked. So Hop didn’t want El at Mike’s house overnight. That made sense.

“Um,” Max said. There was a weird buzzing in the back of her head. “Okay. How long would you need to stay there?”

“Four weeks,” El said, holding up four fingers.  _ Four weeks. _ Max’s longest sleepover had been a week, and it had been with a friend she’d been close to for years. This was definitely the longest conversation she’d ever had with El.

_ But they could become really close. _

“I’d have to ask my parents,” Max said. “I don’t think they’d say no, though, so…”

She waggled her fingers as if displaying a surprise and smiled.  _ What the fuck am I doing right now _ , she thought. 

Then El smiled back. She grinned, actually, and Max could see that her canines were a little messed up, and Max noticed how pink her cheeks were and how bright her eyes were, and there was a tiny kick in her chest. For some reason, the only thought she could muster was,  _ this is how Mike must feel all the time. _

_ Lucky guy. _

“I’ll get your phone number from Mike,” El said. “I’ll call you at seven fifteen.”

“Okay,” Max said, dazed by what she’d just randomly agreed to, and also dazed from the smile. She was pretty sure her head had lost her body; she was floating a few hundred feet over her own neck, watching this unfold.

Then El took her cup of soda and walked by her, back towards the TV room. Max just stood there, processing what a  _ huge mistake that was _ . Eventually, she turned towards the Henderson’s oven and looked at her own reflection.

Her smile had too much teeth. She sighed. She must have looked like a maniac.

  
  



	4. El

It was bright and sunny when Hop packed up his truck and briefed El on how to contact him. El was angry about the sun. She thought it would be much more appropriate for the weather to be fogged-over and gloomy. She certainly felt like that.

“Do  _ you  _ have everything you need?” Hop asked her, after he’d made her swear to pick up the phone that evening at Max’s. “Toothbrush? Uh, hairbrush?”

“Yes,” El said, putting all the force of her anger in her voice. She knew Hop noticed, and was glad that he only patted her on the shoulder and turned back to the truck. 

“Ready, Joyce?” he called.

“Ready,” Joyce said, from around the other side. She rounded the car and smiled at El. El might have been reasonably disgruntled about Joyce stealing Hop away, but she still liked her a lot. Sometimes, when she looked at Joyce she felt a soft, sad, ache in her stomach. If El could have lived as Jane- if Mama had succeeded, and El had lived with her and Becky- she thought that she would have hoped to have a mother like Joyce.

“Where’s your friend?” Joyce asked. “Do you want us to drop you off at her house?”

Hop looked at the already completely overstuffed car. “Where’s she gonna go?” he asked Joyce quietly. “The roof?”

El shook her head. “No.”

“Okay,” Hop said. “I’ll see you in a few weeks, kid.”

“Uh-huh.”

He gave her a hug, and she returned it even though she was angry. Then she hugged Joyce, enjoying her floral, warm scent. She went up to the porch and waved goodbye at them as they drove off through the trees.

She was alone. El sighed, wishing she’d asked Mike to come today, but she didn’t think Hop would’ve felt very good about leaving if he’d seen him sneaking around the back of the house. Maybe that should have been her motive, then. 

El went inside. Then, she went outside, feeling uneasy. Where was Max? What was she supposed to do if she never showed up? 

El dawdled. She had put most of her shirts and pants in big trash bags (Hop said that bringing boxes wouldn’t be good- like she was moving in- but he didn’t have any actual travel bags) and she could entertain herself with books or magazines or TV, but she just didn’t feel like it. All she felt like doing was standing in the sun. So she went back onto the porch and closed her eyes.

Maybe hours passed. “El!” was the sound that broke through the peaceful birdsong and hum of insects and wind. El looked down from the porch, and there was Max.

Maybe it hadn’t been as long as she thought, because the sun was bright on Max’s hair, turning it into coppery fire. El loved Max’s hair. She remembered telling Mike about it, a few months after Halloween, and he had looked confused, so she hadn’t mentioned it again. But she really did like it; she wondered if it would be hot if she put her hands to it.

Max waved, one hand in the front pocket of her shorts. El nodded, and went inside to get her trash bag.

She was still trying to find the best way to carry it (with both arms wrapped around it? By the flimsy red handles?) when Max came in, her footsteps shy on the floorboards.

“Nice cabin,” Max said.

“Thank you. I have a bag.” El pointed at the bag on the floor, slumped over. 

Max’s eyebrows rose. “A trash bag.”

“Yes.”

“Are your clothes and stuff in there?”

El nodded, and looked back at the bag. From here, it did look a little pathetic.

“You don’t have a lot,” Max commented. “Not that- not that that’s a problem. Just an observation. There’s nothing wrong with not having a lot of clothes.”

“Uh-huh. You walked here?”

“Yeah.” Max laughed in a burst. “Sorry. There’s not exactly a clear road back here.”

El went forward and grabbed the bag around the middle. For a moment she just stood there, in the center of the room, and waited for her to remember something else she needed. Hop said she could come back if she wanted to, not to stay the night but just to “hang out” with “two or more people at a time”. Hop was always so worried about Mike. He made no sense sometimes.

“Ready to go?” El heard Max say, and realized she’d been zoning out again. 

“Yes,” El said, and led the way out of the cabin. She didn’t look back. Last year, all she’d wanted was to leave, find Mike and live in the real world. Now she sort of wanted to take a nap in her own bed.

They walked through the woods. El couldn’t smell anything besides the bitter plastic of the bag, and she was in a sour mood. Max wasn’t exactly helping; she was being totally silent, but in the unsure way that confused El endlessly.

“Quiet,” El finally remarked.

“Huh?” Max said, falling back a step.

“You’re quiet.”

“Sorry,” Max said, sounding sheepish and unsure. “I… um..." She paused, and then blurted, "What’s your favorite color?”

El looked at her curiously. “Color?”

“That wasn’t… sorry, that wasn’t what I meant to say,” Max said.

“What did you mean to say?”

Max paused. “Well…”

El had had enough of this. She knew Max was funny and talkative- she had seen her and Lucas all the time. “You don’t like me.”

“No!” Max cried, immediately, sounding startled. “Of course not! God, where did- did someone say that? Because that’s not true, El, I swear.”

“Why are you so quiet then? Angry?”

El looked at Max, and her cheeks were red. “I’m not- I thought you didn’t like  _ me. _ ” When El didn’t respond, Max added, “and you can be, I don’t know, intimidating? Just sometimes.”

Intimidating. El knew that word- she never would have thought someone would apply it to  _ her _ .

“I’m not intimidating,” El said.

“Maybe to you,” Max argued, and in that moment El saw the funny-Max in her. Just a glimpse. “I mean… well, you’ve got the superpower thing going on.”

El smiled. “Yeah.”

“Like, do you even know how you look when you go all magicky?”

“Magicky?” El echoed, and Max laughed a little bit.

“It’s really scary. Plus the nosebleed, and the eyes. Like this,” and Max touched her shoulder to get her to look at her. Max had her eyebrows pressed down, and she was scowling deeply. El laughed, sort of delighted.

“No,” El said.

“Yes!” Max said, her blue eyes going wide. “And then, the bad guy goes flying! It’s absolutely terrifying.”

“Are you scared you’ll fly?” El asked, raising her eyebrows, and Max snorted. This was how to get funny-Max out, El decided. She liked to be challenged.

“I’m not scared of your powers,” Max said. “The  _ look _ is the scary thing.”

“Then I’ll look at you like this,” El said, and widened her eyes as far as she could, fake-smiling with all her might. That set Max off, laughing so hard she had to stop walking. El laughed too, unable to keep her face that way, and put down her bag.

“Please do. God.” Max reached out and lightly touched her shoulder again. What did that mean? Max’s face was flushed and dazzling- El had never seen someone with a face so alive. And her hair was burning again, catching the light falling through the trees. “I will be disappointed if you don’t.”

“Let’s go,” El said, setting her face again and watching as Max dissolved into laughter. She  _ did  _ dissolve, sort of into herself, face overtaken with joy.

“Okay, we need to go faster,” Max said, when she’d calmed down at last. “I don’t know if I can make up all the time we’re going to spend lost before dark.”

“Mm,” El agreed, and they walked again. This time, though, she could tell that Max was happier. It was like her joy was lighting and lifting her from the inside. Her legs moved with confidence, her eyes wider, her cheeks stained pink. 

They didn’t make it out of the woods before dark. Somehow Max had been leading them the wrong direction the entire time. But El found that she didn’t really care.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok the REAL gay is starting in the next chapter.


	5. Max

It was like a dam had opened. Max had never been so relieved to find that she liked someone. Conversation was still difficult. Max found herself unable to fill the silences between them right away, no context or history to fall back on, but they kept a reasonable banter between them, mostly centered around the boys. El seemed to have caught on that Max loved to complain, because she let her ramble on and on about Lucas’s faults, chiming in at the silences to agree. El was odd. She was altogether more and less than Max had expected, and Max wasn’t sure what to do with that yet.

They had time to figure it out, though. Four weeks, where they’d be sharing a space. Max didn’t know if it was good or bad.

By the time she got home, it was dark out. Luckily, Billy’s car was gone from the driveway. Max didn’t know what she’d do if Billy decided to pick a fight with her in front of El. Billy was one of the bad guys, wasn’t he? Max thought Billy was an asshole, but she also didn’t want to watch El blow his brains out.

She was so lucky her stepdad was gone for work, because Jesus Christ she couldn’t have handled him tonight. He’d be back next week, but Max was hoping by then she would have briefed El. Prepared her.

Her mom was sitting at the dinner table when they walked in, and her face lit up when Max came in. It was no secret to Max that her mom was very excited that Max was having a  _ girl  _ over. She probably thought El would convert Max to the secret feminine cult, replace the horror movies and skateboarding with something appealingly palatable. 

“You must be Elle,” her mom said, standing up. El set down her trash bag, and Max saw the twinge of confusion cross her mom’s face. Thankfully, she said nothing. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Max’s mom.”

“Hi,” El said, stiffly. She looked around, past Max’s mom, and then straight at her. 

“Are you girls hungry?” she asked. “There’s lasagna. And lemonade.”

Max watched El scratch her ear. “No,” she said.

Again, the twinge of confusion. “No thanks, Mom,” Max jumped in. “We both had big lunches.”

“Oh. Well, you can go up to Max’s room.” Max’s mom smiled again at El, who nodded once and went to pick up her bag. Max could only imagine that her mom was annoyed. Finally Max had made a friend who wasn’t a guy and she wasn’t even normal. 

Max felt strangely self-conscious showing El her room, but El didn’t seem to have any qualms plopping herself down on Max’s bed and staring at the wall. 

“Are you sure you don’t want any dinner?” Max asked. “It’s okay if you don’t want to eat with my mom. I can get some food up for us.”

“No,” El said. She looked at Max then, her eyes searching. “You mom is bad?”

Max frowned. “I don’t think  _ bad  _ is the word I’d use. For my  _ mom. _ I mean, my stepbrother’s an asshole. And my stepdad’s... loud.”

“Angry-loud?”

Max shrugged. “Yeah.”

El nodded empathetically. “Creepy.”

Max smiled a little bit, but she was pretty sure El wasn’t kidding. She shifted from one foot to the other, and then exhaled and asked, “do you want to watch a movie?”

“Do you?”

Max didn’t, but what else was there for them to do? She shrugged. “What do you want to do?”

“What do you do?” El asked. “Sleepover things?”

Max laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know how to do sleepover things. I haven’t had a sleepover with another girl in, like, two years.”

El cocked her head. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t exactly give off a friendly girly vibe.” Max gestured at herself and grinned, self-consciously. “Just one of the guys. I’m surprised I managed to get a boyfriend after all.”

It had been a joke, but El looked incredulous. “No,” she said. “You give off a  _ good  _ vibe.” She said vibe like she was unfamiliar with the term, but she sounded really sincere. Max was actually a little thrown off-balance by that- was this some kind of ploy? 

“Well, I don’t think it’s what the girls around here want to associate with,” Max said. 

“I’m a girl around here.”

“And this is a necessary sleepover,” Max countered. She was smiling as she said it, but El looked guilty, like it actually hurt her to be doing this. Max clapped loudly to disturb the weirdness of the conversation, and pointed at her bathroom door. 

“Actually, I do know something they do at sleepovers. You do makeovers!”

El’s eyes lit up. “Oh! I know!”

Max led her over to the small assortment of tubes and powders and sticks her mom had given her. Occasionally, Max would dust something on, or poke at a zit with the cream-colored stuff, but she always came out looking artificial. Or whatever. Anyway, Lucas didn’t seem to mind her makeup-free, so she didn’t exactly feel pressured to figure it out.

“I don’t know how it works,” Max said. “I don’t want to make you look like a clown.”

El shook her head, smiling excitedly. “I’ll do you!”

Max blushed, sure that El had no idea how those words could be misconstrued, and obediently sat against the wooden doors of her sink. For some reason, El was giggling, and that made Max feel giggly too. It was like the weirdness of their previous conversation had never happened.

El certainly seemed to know what she was doing; she selected a dark brown pencil and uncapped it. She hesitated. “Can I?” she asked.

“What?” 

El reached up and gently cupped Max’s face, and it caught Max  _ completely  _ off-guard. Like, holy shit, this girl should really warn her when she was about to touch her face! Because Max’s heart was jumping around like crazy, and she had to regain control of her own breath. 

El’s hand was soft, her touch really light, and Max was kind of astounded that these were the hands that she used to fuck over the Upside Down with. El asked her to close her eyes, and Max did. 

She could smell El’s hand soap. It was lemony. 

“You’re leaning,” El commented, and Max’s eyes shot open. 

“What?”

“You’re leaning,” El said, and Max realized she had been  _ leaning her head into El’s hand _ . She shook her head and laughed, but it came out all strangled and weird.

_ What the fuck was going on? _

El asked her to close her eyes, and this time Max focused on not floating away on a magic cloud of lemon hand soap. That had to be it. There was some weird drug the government had decided to put into El’s hand soap that made Max light-headed and panicked. 

An eternity later, El removed her hand from Max’s cheek, and Max could sort of breathe again. Her face felt cold where El had left, and way too hot everywhere else. Allergic reaction to makeup, maybe?

“Wait,” El said, and a second later, her finger grazed Max’s lips.

Max realized she had her eyes closed, still, and opened them. El hovered inches away, brow furrowed as she applied something to Max’s lips, and Max had a sudden thought. Something like,  _ her finger feels so nice against my lips- _ and then something else.

Something else about El.

Max squashed the thought down before it could rise up, replacing it with images of open sores and blisters. Nope. Nope. No. It was now essential that she stop thinking entirely. She was never going to have another thought again, ever. It was too dangerous, and completely unnecessary.

“Done,” El said, and leaned back.  _ Thank God _ , Max thought. “You can see.”

Max stood and looked in the mirror, and her reflection startled a laugh out of her. El had given her thick, dark raccoon eyes and smeared blush and lipgloss on underneath, like a happier afterthought. It was completely ridiculous, and weirdly appealing. 

“Wow,” Max said, touching her face.

“Bitchin’?” El asked, looking on nervously. Max grinned at her in the mirror.

“So bitchin’. I think I could make a little kid pee himself.”  _ In laughter or in fear. _

That seemed to be exactly what El was looking for, because she smiled that bright, beautiful smile, and Max had to remind herself to stop thinking again.

They slept in the same bed that night, but Max didn’t let herself drift too close. She was up half the night rolling away from El, but when she woke up in the morning, their ankles were pressed together. Max scrambled away so fast that she fell straight out of bed.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah this scene is very similar to my first gay moment.  
> Will is in the next chapter!


	6. El

“Do you want something to drink?” Mike asked. “Coke?”

El nodded. The lights in the basement were comfortably warm, and it smelled a little like Mike down here. Besides her own room, El loved it best out of any place in the world. It gave her a feeling like she’d been awake for a long time and had finally come to sleep. 

These days, though, it seemed to have changed a lot. El wasn’t sure how she liked that.

Mike ran upstairs, a big production of galumphing feet and limbs, and El watched him until he disappeared. Then she turned her attention to Will, who sat against the wall opposite her.  Will looked better than he had before. His head was bigger, El noted. His cheeks weren’t so pale anymore, too. He still looked sort of miserable, though. 

Even when he was smiling, El thought. There was a Will-window in his eyes, and she could see something sad and lost in there.

“Bored?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Lonely.”

Another thing: Will was a good friend.

A few months ago, El had heard something in the woods in the middle of the night. She had opened her window, and looked out, and Will was standing there in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. His eyes were wide, and she could see the whites of them from a few feet away.

“Eleven?” Will called. “Is that- so you do-”

“This is my house,” El said. She almost decided to close the window then, but there was something soft and scared in his expression, and El felt like Will needed something here. So she beckoned him closer. “Do you want to come in?”

And he’d accepted.

He didn’t tell her that night what he’d been doing in the woods, even though it obviously took him an hour or more to walk there and back, but on their third or fourth, he had admitted that he felt like he needed to check there. “To make sure the Mind Flayer wasn’t still there,” he said, sounding ashamed. “I didn’t know you were still… well, I mean, I guess I did, but I didn’t really think of it until I got there.”

El patted his hand. “I closed the gate,” she said. “Now we can watch movies.”

That’s what they did, when Will came over. It was usually on nights that he knew Mike was gone, like when he’d gone on a two-week vacation in January, or just because he couldn’t sleep. He rode his bike, and El let him in through the door.

Hop didn’t even mind him coming around. He walked in one them while they were watching something around two or three in the morning, given them a perplexed look, and gone back to his room. Later, Hop said he didn’t mind if it was Will because he was “probably a queer.”

El looked up that word, and couldn’t figure out why Will being “ _ adj. strange or odd _ ” made him less of a threat than Mike.

Anyway, being friends with Will was good, El thought. Sometimes, she imagined that she and Will were siblings. Hop was their dad and Joyce was their mom (Jonathan fit in somewhere- she didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion). They lived in a house with a basement like Mike’s, and every morning they ate Eggos, and El went to school, and she didn’t have to think about the Bad Men, or the Upside Down, or Papa.

Will was smart, too. He talked about movies and music like he actually understood them. That was Jonathan’s work, he said. They had never once talked about the Upside Down.

When El walked into Mike’s basement that morning, charged with the freedom that Hop being gone allowed her, she hadn’t been upset to see Will there. It just reinforced how much time she was going to get to spend with  _ all  _ her friends that summer.

“D and D?” El asked Will, a little hopefully. She had never actually played before, but she knew it was supposed to be fun and relaxing. 

Will shrugged. “I don’t think Mike wants to. Also, DnD.”

“D Endy?”

“Sure.” Will smiled. “Wait, did you come over to play?”

El shook her head. “We were going to kiss.”

Will blushed. “Oh. Uh, sorry. Do you want me to leave?”

“No. We can all… hang.” El was pretty sure that was the appropriate slang. She squinted, and Will nodded approvingly. Will was the best at telling her when she was saying the right thing.

Mike came down the stairs again, hair flopping. He was holding two coke cans and looking frazzled.

“Sorry, I couldn’t find them.” He plunked the sodas on his table, and stood up, eyes flicking towards Will. He seemed surprised. “Oh, I-”

“I should probably leave,” Will said, starting the stand up. Mike smiled, looking relieved.

“Yeah, sorry-”

“Why?” El said, and Will stopped abruptly. “Let’s play cards.”

Mike looked surprised, and it occurred to El that, when she thought about it, she had never actually been with Mike and Will at the same time. As a group, they had hung out. But maybe there was an unspoken rule against being together in this kind of setting.

El should ask Max. She thought she would probably know.

“Okay,” Mike said. “That’s good. What game?”

“Go Fish,” El said. Hop had taught her how to play early on in her quarantine in the cabin, and she was pretty good at it. Hop promised that someday soon, he’d teach her Blackjack.

Mike had to find some cards, so she and Will sat around, talking in intervals. Will said that his brother was becoming increasingly disgusting with his girlfriend (Mike looked mildly disturbed at this) and Will was sure one of these nights he was going to ask him to move out for a few days.

“So they can play house,” Will explained. “It should be pretty good, though. There’s no way Nancy would willingly date my brother after one day living with him.”

“Don’t talk about my sister like that,” Mike said, coming back and setting down a deck of Great Parks playing cards.

“What, like she had standards?”

Will looked at Mike, and El realized that he didn’t look at him like Lucas and Dustin looked at him. His eyes were more like hers, El thought. 

They started playing. As it turned out, Mike was terrible. He didn’t really remember the rules, which clearly pissed him off. Also, he was just acting  _ different _ \- it was hard to explain. El was accustomed to how Mike acted around her, which was sort of scrambly and low-voiced and chipper, but she was unused to how he acted around Will. It was just… more  _ familiar, _ El guessed. His eyes lost that satisfied kind of look, and became almost younger. Brighter. His voice raised octaves; he pouted and grinned like a little kid. He looked a lot more like Old-Mike (crouched in the basement, offering her Eggos) and not like New-Mike (kissing her on her front porch, smirking at Hop as they passed), and El got a funny swooping feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t name.

The hardest thing about being so lost behind everyone else was that El had to figure out all the lurches in her chest and the sudden warmth and the wriggling awfulness without anyone’s assistance. She had to invent a new name for every passing feeling, struggling to name them without people she could really ask. No moms. No older sisters, no older friends- she had Mike, but who did she ask about a jumpy heartbeat? Who did she call when she started bleeding suddenly and didn’t know why?

She thought she was dying. Hop was away, and she was alone in her cabin, stumbling around trying to figure out what to do. El must have called him dozens of times before she confessed to his operator, Flo, what was happening. If she hadn’t told her, El didn’t know what she would have done. 

The worst part was not knowing, and the second worst was the shame that came along with that. If she were normal, she would know. If she were normal, she could understand why seeing her boyfriend change so drastically before her eyes made her so sad and tangled-up inside.

But she was never going to be normal.

El won the game. Then again. They started a third round, but Mike got so frustrated that he collected their cards and forced them to play Monopoly instead. That was a mistake. Will was too smart, and El had no problem surrendering to his whims when the game became competitive. After all, she did love to see Mike crack a little. She liked to see what he really looked like.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter there will be Robin, and the mall!


	7. Max

Living with El wasn’t bad. It was actually really agreeable. A little too agreeable. 

In short, Max was having too much fun.

She was having too much fun watching El brush her teeth in the morning. She was having too much fun watching her eat her cereal. She was  _ especially  _ having too much fun going to sleep next to her at night, and it was really fucking terrifying. 

It was like there was this monster inside Max’s chest, this big monster with claws and teeth and hot, stinky breath, and he was lodged inside her, snarling and roaring and generally acting like a huge bitch. Max didn’t want to be a monster-carrier. She didn’t want to have such an intensity of emotions over El accidentally meeting her eyes over the dinner table, while her mom babbled about her workday. When El said good-night to her and fell asleep on the pillow next to hers, Max’s chest-monster started banging on her chest, demanding to be let out, making sleep nearly impossible.

It had only been three days, and Max was in  _ hell. _

The first day, El had gone to Mike’s house on the back of Max’s bike, and Mike gave her back. The second day, El had realized she had forgotten something at her cabin, and set off alone in the woods. The third day, El went to Will’s house on the back of Max’s bike.

Like, Max spent most of the day not even looking at El, and she was still going insane over her.

The first part was, Max didn’t know what it all meant. Like, was she a dyke? Was this the universe’s shitty way of showing her that she was a lesbian?

God.

That would be so fucking hilarious. If she was actually queer.

Billy had spent most of her formative years insisting that calling herself “Max” instead of Maxine, and riding skateboards, and hanging out with guys was unbearably dykish. That had died down more recently. Probably the boyfriend. 

Max had a  _ boyfriend. _

Max was not a lesbian.

So she woke up on the fourth day and decided that enough was enough. She and El were hereby official friends. Any and all weird feelings could get the fuck out of Max’s head, and fuck off to gayville and  _ stay  _ there.

She woke up first, but El didn’t take long after. Max evacuated the bed after telling her good morning, not wanting to watch her stretch and blink the sleepiness out of her eyes, and brushed her teeth. She brushed her hair, twice, so she wouldn’t accidentally walk in on El changing. So far that hadn’t been a problem, but Max didn’t-

Fuck off! Max didn’t care about that. She was passionate about her hair.

She and El switched places, Max throwing on some shorts and a tank top as fast as humanly possible while El used the bathroom, then Max called to tell her she was going down for breakfast.

“Do you want me to pour you a bowl?” Max asked.

“No,” El said, in her usual tone, but added, “thank you.”

Fuck off.

Max went down. Her mom wasn’t sitting where she normally would, but that didn’t bother Max so much. She had also stopped worrying about Billy, too; apparently, he had skipped town with some girl. Not the first time, and probably not the last. He’d come home eventually.

Max didn’t look up from her Lucky Charms when El sat down. She heard her yawn though, and the dry clatter of cereal in her bowl.

“How was your sleep?” El asked.

“Adequate.”

“You were in my dream,” El said, sounding happy. “Not all of it.”

“Oh?” Max tried to keep her voice level. 

“I don’t remember why. You had a horse.” El nodded, thoughtfully. “You said his name was Igor.”

Max laughed. “That’s a shitty name for a horse.”

“He was dark green. Your hair and his looked like Christmas.”

Max pursed her lips, pretending to study El. “I feel like that’s a secret insult. Like, the combination of horse and my hair and Christmas… it seems suspicious.”

“Noo,” El said. “I like your hair.”

Seriously, fuck off. 

“Well, we don’t have to worry about it, because if I got a green horse, I would definitely never name him Igor.” Max stood, ready to take her bowl to the sink. “Where are you going today?”

El met her eyes, and tilted her head. “Maybe just us? Today.”

Torture. The universe was deliberately trying to torture her. Max would literally rather eat a live scorpion than do that. And at the same time, she would eat dozens of live scorpions  _ to  _ hang out with El alone. No Mike. Just them.

“Sure,” Max said. “That sounds… good. Do you wanna stay home? Or we could go to the mall, maybe watch a movie…”

God, she was making it sound like she was asking her on a date. If El noticed her blushing profusely, though, she ignored it. Instead, she winced.

“Against the rules.”

Max rolled her eyes, desperate to convince her. “I don’t know how anything can be  _ against the rules  _ for you. What’s the worst that could happen? You have  _ super powers _ .”

El smiled like she was trying not to. Max continued.

“If you have to take a guy out, you take him out! Wham!” She imitated El, using her dramatic face and using her free hand to zap an invisible opponent. El laughed, and stood up with her bowl, too.

“Okay,” she said. “Don’t tell Hop.”

“Oh, so I wasn’t supposed to be reporting all our conversations to him nightly?” Max fake-cringed. “I had no idea. Whoops!”

Max had enough cash to cover them both (it was supposed to be for her next date with Lucas, but she refused to consider that as she shoved it into her bag) and it didn’t take her too long before she was mall-ready. El looked excited, too, as Max wheeled her bike to the front of the house. Her eyes were sparkling- honest to God. She was like an animated character, with her big eyes and pink cheeks and perfect lips.

Fuck the FUCK off.

The day was sort of perfect for this kind of thing, not too warm but not threatening rain. As they sped down the street, El’s hands gripping Max’s shoulders, her laugh warm in her ears, Max felt really relaxed. Like she had ridden so fast she left all the nervousness and shame and guilt behind her, and she was just flying. It felt so good that when she had to slow down and turn onto the main road, she almost wanted to cry.

The mall was still congested, even in the morning. Max was getting used to living in a small town, but it was still surprising how crazily obsessed people were with the mall. Not that Max didn’t find it fun- it wasn’t as if they had anything else close to it in the rest of town. Max was pretty sure El was going to flip her shit when she saw the inside, though.

She parked her bike in the front and dismounted, feeling sweaty and sort of disgusting. El didn’t seem to care, though- she was staring at the building in some mixture of awe and fear. Before she could say anything, Max grabbed her hand and pulled her inside.

Neither of them had any idea where to go first (El because she had never seen a mall before, and Max because she hadn’t considered it too much), so Max picked a random store and showed El inside. She seemed at a loss, surrounded by all the clothes.

“What do I do?” she whispered to Max, as if she had to hide her confusion. 

“Uh,” Max said, not sure how much El knew and not wanting to condescend. “You just… try things on.”

El squinted around. They were in the Gap- everything was brightly colored and flashy, so different from El’s subdued shirts and button-ups. El wore less color than  _ Mike  _ did, Max realized. 

When El did start trying things on, everything was neon, though. She seemed really into neon. Max sat on the couch at the end of the row of dressing rooms, commenting on El’s outfits as she walked out in them. After a while, Max realized that she was useless there. El didn’t actually care what Max thought about her clothes; she was just happy to try them on. 

She was really like no one Max had ever met.

Apparently, El had never been told to buy in moderation when someone else was paying, because Max felt like she had replaced El’s entire wardrobe by the time they were done, but Max didn’t mind. Walking out of the Gap, El looked flushed and happy, and she grabbed Max’s hand as they went. Max didn’t know if that was because Max had been pulling her along before, or just because she wanted to, but it was sort of  _ incredible  _ to walk through the mall with their hands linked.

She was  _ not  _ expecting to see Lucas.

Well, maybe she should have been. It wasn’t like she kept tabs on Lucas everywhere he went, so it wasn’t  _ weird  _ that she saw him there, but it was like a collision from another life. Max had been so caught up in not thinking about El that she had blocked out what she should have been thinking about instead. 

And her and Lucas weren’t like Mike and El. They went on dates, sure, but they didn’t spend nearly as much time inseperable. Really, there was nothing wrong with her hanging out with El. But when she saw Lucas standing with his sister by the fountain, she felt hot guilt in her chest and reacted instinctively. She bolted.

She forgot that she was towing El behind her- she dashed up the escalator, heart beating high in her throat, and sped into the first store she saw. The ice cream shop- it was where Steve was working for the summer, so she had heard about it from Dustin.

Unfortunately, she was still running when she got past the entrance, and so she proceeded to trip on the leg of a table and crash head-first into the linoleum. It was a miracle she let go of El’s hand and didn’t send them both sprawling.

She didn’t black out. That wasn’t her style. Instead, she felt an immediate pain throughout her whole face, rolled over and clutched her nose. Max had sprained ankles and wrists skateboarding, and so it really shouldn’t have been such a shock for her to be in so much pain so suddenly, but Max had  _ not  _ been ready to be kicked in the face by the universe today, and it sucked.

When she emerged from her cocoon of  _ agony  _ she could hear someone talking. She thought it was El at first, but the words were too drawl-y and low. Mystery voice said, “Jesus Christ, you went down fast! Like, I don’t even know what you tripped on, air? Jesus. Are you going to- should I call someone?”

Max uncovered her face and looked up. Above her, El was looking panicked, and the second person, some random teenage girl with raised eyebrows, was talking.

“Hello? How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Max said, through gritted teeth. She gingerly sat up, and her head split open from pain. Not literally. It might as well have been literal, though. Max almost considered tapping the sides to check.

“Broken bones? Any damage they could hold against this fine establishment in a court of law?” The girl tilted her head and grinned a little. “Wow, I can’t believe your nose isn’t bleeding.”

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” Max said. “Please don’t make a scene.”

“Oh, I had no intention,” the girl said. “Can I help you to a seat?”

Max ignored her and accepted the hand El offered her instead. El helped her sit down at the traitorous table, and Max leaned her head against her hands. This was very embarrassing. This was very, very embarrassing.

“Okay, I’m not sure what company policy is for this, but I feel like I should offer you free ice cream. Do you want free ice cream?”

“Yeah,” Max said, hoping this would make her go away. It did. The girl galloped back behind the register, and El sat down across from Max. 

“Did you see the Bad Men?” El asked seriously.

“What? No. There are no more bad men.”

El listed her head. “Why did you run?”

“Oooh,” Max said, almost laughing. “Oh. No. It’s nothing bad like that. I just saw Lucas, and… I decided to run away from him.”

Now El looked decidedly more confused. “Why would you run from Lucas?”

Max searched for an excuse. “I’m, uh… well, I’m waiting for a good time to break up with him, you know?” 

“WHAT?” 

El didn’t lose the softness of her voice when she was surprised, but her eyes got wide and her eyebrows shot up, which startled Max a little.

“Yeah. I break up with him a lot. It’s no big deal.”

“But… he’s your boyfriend.” El looked at Max like she was making no sense at all. “Don’t you… kiss him?”

“Yeah,” Max said, blushing hard. “But that doesn’t- that doesn’t really have anything to do with whether or not I’m going to break up with him.”

El looked like she had more to say, but before she could speak the ice cream girl returned with two cups of ice cream. “U.S. Butterscotch,” she said. “It’s our best- oh, her nose is bleeding.”

Max immediately looked at El, but her nose was completely fine. Then she realized the girl was talking to her. El let out a squeak of shock, and said, “I’ll!” She failed to clarify what she was going to do before speeding away, out of the shop, presumably to find tissues. Both Max and the girl called after her- it would be a lot easier to use the ice cream napkins- but El was gone.

“What’s with you two and running?” the girl said, sort of under her breath, and transferred a napkin cartridge from the table over to Max’s. Max grabbed three and shoved them over her nose. “Seriously, I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to run in the mall. Or maybe that’s just school?”

“It’s your fault for putting the tables in my way,” Max said.

“Hey. I gave you free ice cream.” The girl pointed one of her painted fingernails and Max and arched an eyebrow. “I don’t want to hear about blame.”

Max regarded her. Her name tag said “Robin”, which she thought sort of fit her. She had stringy, blonde-brown hair and freckles, and she was wearing two chain necklaces. Cool, Max begrudgingly thought. 

“I don’t usually run in the mall,” Max confessed. “I was sort of trying to escape from my boyfriend.”

“Whoa. Who said I wanted to hear your life story?” Robin held her hands up.

“That’s kind of insulting. Don’t you want to hear about my personal shit?”

“Not really.” Robin looked at her; Max couldn’t help but imagine what she saw. Probably: red-haired, pale, young. “How old are you, thirteen?”

“I’ll be a freshman next fall,” Max said. She’d turn fourteen next month, anyway.

They stared at each other, until Robin sighed and leaned forward. “Fine. What’s going on with your boyfriend? Are you cheating on him or something?”

Max’s eyes widened. “El’s just my friend,” she said, quickly. Then she realized that Robin was probably joking- there was no way she would serious inquire after something like that.

“Okay,” Robin said. Her eyes narrowed, like she was trying to see something in Max, and Max looked away. She wasn’t a dyke, and if she thought it then Robin couldn’t see it. 

“But,” Max said, and plowed on, “it’s  _ not  _ El, but if I… liked someone that wasn’t my boyfriend… like, wanted to kiss them… is that cheating?”

Robin groaned, and her head fell back. “This is so out of my pay grade. Thirteen year olds cheating on each other.”

“So it is cheating?”

“You think I know?” Robin said, head whipping up. “I’m probably the worst girl in this town to ask about boy stuff.”

And there was something in her tone, something careful. Like she was handing something gentle to Max, folding her hands around it so they didn’t have to see it. Max almost wanted to return the favor. She almost wanted to tell this girl, who she had met literally  _ two  _ minutes ago, that she thought she might be…

El came careening back into the shop, and both Max and Robin jumped up, yelling for her to be careful. Mercifully, she didn’t fall. She handed Max a full toilet paper roll instead. Max thanked her, but her nosebleed had stopped a minute ago. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can't tell by now, I am projecting full force into this girl.   
> The next chapter is shorter and Mike is in it!


	8. El

Hop said that if you tried not to think about something, you’d go crazy. You’d be thinking about avoiding thinking about it, and that would just be another way of thinking about it, and it was easier to just accept that it was impossible to erase something from your mind.

El was like that with what Max had said. About breaking up with Lucas.

And it was bad because El didn’t even know why! She knew what breaking up was- she watched a lot of TV. It had always seemed horrifying to her, this cleaving of two halves. It was all sadness, just crying and crying and ice cream, but sadness ice cream. El had even had bad dreams about breaking up where she woke up tearful.

And Max had it said it  _ like it was nothing _ .

Her eyes had gone wide, and her mouth had quirked, meaning that El was doing something weird. But  _ Max was the weird one _ ! Why would she have a boyfriend at all if she was going to break up with him?

And an even worse feeling was that El was sort of glad that Max had wanted to. Because they had been holding hands and shopping and laughing. And El hadn’t wanted Lucas to come in, hadn’t wanted Lucas to come and kiss Max away from her.

El couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She had a date with Mike today. He was coming to Max’s house to pick her up, and then they were going to his basement. El was glad to get away from Max for the day, she thought. Maybe that was true. She could not pry answers from the jumble of her own mind, inescapably confusing and unbearably hard to persuade to give up its secrets.

At least it was gloomy today.

It might even rain. Mike looked brightly colored against the muteness of the rest of the world, his skin pale, his hair dark, and his shirt yellow. He smiled when he saw her come out, and waved at Max, who must have been in the window upstairs or something. Max hadn’t come down for breakfast.

“Ready?” Mike asked when she approached. 

She nodded, and sat on the back of his bike. Quietly, she put her arms around his shoulders and held on. His hair smelled like him, even after all this time.

El knew a few things about Mike that were absolutely certain. The first was that he was good. He had always been good. No matter what smirking certainty he wrapped himself in, or years piled on top of him, El was certain he would always be good.

They sped down the hill at top speed, the wind buffeting Mike’s hair into her face, and El rested her cheek against his back. She and Max had gone down this hill yesterday- El had been thinking that she wished she could press her cheek against Max’s back just like it. She hadn’t, of course.

She had held her hand, though. In the mall.

Max hadn’t seemed to mind, so El had thought it was okay. There was nothing wrong with them holding hands, she thought. But now she was thinking that maybe Max was an immoral break-up-er. 

Had she ever held one of her other friend’s hands like that? Maybe Will- sometimes he talked like he was drowning, speaking from the bottom of a pit he wasn’t sure how to get out of. El had grown accustomed to it.

He hadn’t looked sad when they were with Mike. El had been thinking about that often, too. It wasn’t quite jealousy that this inspired in her- it would be bad to be jealous of happiness, happiness that didn’t even belong to her- but it was something. 

Once, Will had talked about Mike. They were distracted from the movie they were supposed to be watching and sitting, talking aimlessly. El had something, something about Mike, and Will, who usually shut down about talking about things outside the room, said, “Mike’s a really good friend.”

“Yes,” El agreed. Of course she agreed- hadn’t he been her first friend? Her best friend. She didn’t think about him in terms of friendship, anymore. 

“Do you know how lucky you are?” Will said. “Both of us, I mean. He looked for me in the rain in the woods.”

“And he found me,” El said. She knew the full story, but no one ever talked about it anymore. “Instead.”

“Yeah. Instead.” Will looked at her then, as if considering something. El wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to encourage this sudden talkativeness. Then Will snapped back. “No one else would have looked. Everyone in this town is such bullshit.”

“Not Mike?” It was a joke.

Will was serious. “No.”

Which shocked El at the time. She loved Mike, back then, and she still did, but Will said that with such unflinching loyalty. Maybe this was where El first decided that Mike was good. If Will could say that then it had to be more than half true.

Mike turned his head. “Okay?” he yelled back at her, against the wind, and she nodded, knowing he’d be able to feel it. But she wasn’t. She felt  _ rotten _ . Like there was something rancid swimming in her core.

Well, rancid wasn’t the right word for it. She was feeling something hot and coppery and guilty, but it was still good. Why else would she be doing this? Why else would she still be thinking about _her_ with her cheek pressed against her boyfriend's back? 

El tried to think about Mike. His hair flopping against her head. His shoulders working as he turned the bike. 

Mike was good, and El didn’t deserve him.

Mike sped into his own neighborhood, and suddenly the thought of kissing Mike sickened El. Because she knew that she would be confused (because she knew that she would be thinking how kissing someone else might be), and he  _ loved her _ , maybe, and she shouldn’t be treating him like this. All these thoughts came to her quickly, in a rush, with such unbending certainty that they shocked El. 

The road rushed under them, so it was a very bad idea for El to try and get off the bike, but she did. Or, she pushed off Mike’s back, got two feet off the bike, landed off-balance and crashed to the ground. She was lucky that she didn’t crash the whole bike, El thought dizzily. She thought it from the street. That was where she was- she was lying on the street.

“El!” Mike cried, and dragged his feet to stop. El watched him absently as he ran over to her, dropping his bike. “Are you okay? Jesus- was I going too fast?”

“No,” El said. Even to her own ears her voice sounded dismal and hollow. She pushed herself up and was grimly reminded of how Max had fallen yesterday. Maybe this was what happened when one broke up with their boyfriend- they had to fall, as punishment. “I’m okay. Mike.”

“Here, let’s get you inside,” he said, offering her his hand, but she batted it away without even thinking about it. All of a sudden, she was trying hard not to cry. Mike looked concerned, probably thinking she was hurting a lot. “El. Don’t cry.”

“ _ No, _ ” El said, and she grabbed his arm, pulling them face to face. “Mike. I am breaking up with you.”

He stared at her. She stared back.

“Huh?” he said.

El released him and stood. Her knees wobbled. Mike stayed on the ground, staring at the spot she had lain, looking stricken. 

“You’re breaking up with me?” he asked, and his voice sort of squeaked on the last word. El nodded, a cavernous guilt inside her battling with a sliver of relief that she had managed to say anything.

“Yes,” she said. Then, because reason had fallen out of her head entirely, she patted the top of his head. Tears welled and spilled over her lower eyelashes.

Without another word, she turned and began to make her way back to Max’s house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's short because the next one is REALLY long. Side note on el patting his head: I did something similarly totally random and awkward after breaking up with my first girlfriend for NO reason. Breaking up is really upsetting! 0/10 would not recommend.


	9. Max

Max had kissed him. 

At the Snow Ball. The lights had twinkled, actually  _ twinkled _ overhead as they danced, and Max had pressed her lips to Lucas’s, watching his eyes light up. It was… it was dry. More like a lip bump than a kiss. But Max didn’t know that. She hadn’t thought Lucas had known it either.

They started dating. It was easy to date Lucas- they were already friends, and Lucas was a good guy. They went to movies. She tried to teach him to skate, and found that he was uncoordinated and impatient. They ate fucking ice cream and held hands and shit.

In the first month.

Nothing derailed them, per say, until halfway through the second month, when Lucas told Max she looked fat, and Max decided to break up with him. It was painless enough, which should have been a sign, but Max was pissed off, and she had always let her head lead her, so she really didn’t dwell too much on it.

He got her back. Of course he did. Because when your ex-boyfriend comes to you with flowers or chocolate or whatever, you get back together with him. Because there was nothing  _ wrong  _ with Lucas. 

The second kiss happened in March.

Movie theater.

Practically empty, because they were ditching school.

Lucas had leaned over and kissed Max, and then he had moved his mouth against hers, this open-close motion that somehow got his tongue in, and suddenly they were making out. Sort of. His teeth scraped her lips. His tongue was warm and wet in her mouth, and honest to God it was  _ disgusting _ . Like, absolutely repulsive. Max wanted to wash her mouth out with soap.

So she’d pulled her face away and said, quickly, “we’re going too fast.”

Lucas had looked at her. He’d leaned back in his chair.

“It’s been months, Max.”

“Well, I’m not ready.”

“When are you going to be?” There was no hostility in his question. He honestly just wanted to know. Max drummed her fingernails against her chair’s armrest and felt a queasiness that she could not define. 

“I don’t know.”

And now it was June, and she was meeting him for ice cream, and she was going to break up with him.

Max sort of wanted to ask her mom to drive her down to the mall- it was a long way to go, and she had  _ just  _ been there- but she didn’t feel up to it. She didn’t want her mom to look at her impatiently, because she was feeling raw on the inside and all she could stand was riding down a hill at full force. So she did.

It was a lot rainier-looking, and Max rode quick to outrun it. Against the pale grey clouds, the mall looked even more technicolor and bright. Max parked her bike in the front and went in.

Lucas waited for her in Scoops Ahoy, which Max was now thinking was not the best spot for a clandestine meeting. To her horror, Robin was working again today, and she gave Max a meaningful look when she walked in, but Max ignored her and headed over to Lucas.

“Hey,” he said. “Nice weather for ice cream.”

“Perfect,” Max agreed, and then felt bad for joking with him. “Listen… I have to say something.”

“Do you wanna order first?”

“Not really.”

Lucas looked disappointed. “Well, I think I will, because I’m really hungry.”

“We need to break up,” Max blurted. God. It was not a fun sentence. It probably never would be a fun sentence.

When she finally scraped together enough courage to look at Lucas, he didn’t look crushed. He looked mildly annoyed.

“Max,” he said. “I think you’re being a little unfair right now.”

“In what way?” Max said, without thinking. “I mean… you’re entitled to your emotions,” she added quickly, looking sympathetic.

Lucas shook his head. “Okay. First, you don’t want to kiss after months of dating-”

Max frowned. “I said I wasn’t ready.”

“And I say you don’t like me,” Lucas said. “Because now you’re breaking up with me for no reason!”

“Lucas, I do like you,” Max said. This was a ridiculous argument to be having after breaking up. “I mean, I did. But there’s a lot of stress in my life right now, and-”

“Face it, Max,” Lucas said, cutting her off. “You only want me around to string me along and complain about El. And I’ve gotten pretty sick of it.”

Max could feel her face heating up. “I don’t- that’s- I talked about her once!”

Lucas rolled her eyes. “If you don’t know how obsessed you are with her, I honestly don’t know where you’ve been during  _ our  _ dates the past few months, but say what you want. I hear you’re friends now anyway, so you really don’t need me anymore.”

“You are being  _ so  _ childish right now.”

“Yeah. I’m the one who asked you to ride thirty minutes to break up with you within the first five minutes of seeing you. Sorry about that, by the way.” Lucas stood abruptly and glared at her. Max kept opening and closing her mouth, completely at a loss. 

“Hey, I’m sorry!” Max said, as he walked away. “Lucas! Are we still going to be friends?”

“Sure, Max! It’ll be just like things were a week ago.” Lucas didn’t wave as he stormed out.

Max just sat there, staring at the table. She knew that she should be upset about how they’d left things, but all she could think was  _ do I really talk about El a lot? _

She thought that was just in her own head.

She heard someone scoot into the chair across from her, and when she looked up it was Robin, looking vaguely interested.

“So, I’m curious…” Robin said, her drawling, half-amused voice a reprieve from the inane ice cream jingle played on loop over the speakers, “was that your boyfriend? Or was that the side piece?”

Max sighed. “Boyfriend.”

“Huh,” Robin said. Max eyed her critically.

“I don’t have a side piece,” she said. “By the way. I wouldn’t do that to him, he’s a really good guy.”

“Sure. And you’re thirteen years old.” Robin wrinkled her nose. “If I were you, I’d be living in sin. Waving my freak flag. Nothing you do at this age will matter, ever again.”

“You’re really helping me get over my break-up,” Max dead-panned.

“You seem _really_ upset about it,” Robin said. “Just doing what I can.”

They sat in silence, and then Robin stood up. “You want ice cream?”

Max shrugged, feeling sluggish and miserable. She wanted to curl up in her bed and not have to think for a few hours. Robin slid over the counter and got a scooper out, not asking Max what she wanted.

“So, uh, your boyfriend.” Robin scooped. “How’d you know he liked you? Grand gesture?”

Max squinted at her. “He revealed government secrets to impress me.”

Robin smiled without looking at her. “ _ Very  _ grand. You know, you can tell when someone likes you when they do shit for you, you know? When they show they care.”

“Is this advice to get  _ another  _ boyfriend?”

“I’m  _ just  _ saying, that when you know someone worries about you, when they do weird things to help you… that’s how you pick up on it. Like, government secrets. Or when they run off and get you a toilet paper roll when your nose is bleeding.”

Max looked up, startled, and Robin was calmly shoveling sprinkles onto Max’s cone. USS Butterscotch again. As if she hadn’t just made a profound and personal revelation, Robin continued. “And, as a thirteen year old,” she handed Max her ice cream, making eye contact, “you are obligated to give it a shot.”

She looked pleading. She looked like she was giving her something. 

“Even thirteen year old love is cool. It’s really rare,” Robin said. “I don’t think you should blow it on another boyfriend.”

Max took her ice cream, wordlessly, and nodded. “Okay,” she said, voice cracking.

The rain started a few merciful minutes after Max got home, but El wasn’t there. The subsequent three hour she spent waiting for her were nerve-wracking, The whole time she felt like her internal organs were being replaced by tiny fire ants, until she was just made entirely of them and there was no more girl left.

The third hour came. There was a hard knock on the door.

Max jumped to her feet and ran to get it, and there was El, Mike not in sight, looking like a drowned rat. That was not an exaggeration. The rain had gotten harder over the last few hours until it had turned into a truly torrential deluge, and El hadn’t been spared. She looked more than wet, like she had swollen from the water, and there was dirt streaked up and down her pant legs. There were about ten leaves stuck in her hair.

“Hi,” El said.

“Oh my God, you look terrible!” Max said. “Come in, God. Are you okay?”

“I walked from Mike’s house,” El explained.

“You  _ walked _ ?” Max blinked at her in shock, and El just blinked. “Why didn’t he give you a ride? Here, come on.”

She helped El step out of her shoes, then hurried her down to her room, trying in vain to keep her from staining the hardwood. El’s teeth were chattering, loud enough for Max to hear her.

“I broke up with Mike,” El said.

If Max were not trying to save El from dying of hypothermia, she would have stopped dead in her tracks. Because,  _ WHAT _ ?!? 

Mike and El were, like, the quintessential couple. They were the disgusting, in love couple. Their stability was cause for envy.

“So, it actually took you three hours to get back?”

“I got lost.”

Max bundled El into her bathroom and slammed the door. She grabbed a towel and told El to wait, while she hurriedly dried down the hallway and the front of the house. She decided to put El’s shoes fully outside, where they sat collected rain like disused bathtubs.

“What’s going on, sweetie?” she heard her mom call from down the hall.

“Nothing!” Max said. “I’m on it!”

There were her four words of conversation for the evening.

El hadn’t moved, not even to take off her socks. Max ran to the shower and turned it on warm, trying to remember the correct way to  _ not  _ give El frostbite (or whatever- her medical knowledge was limited) and then hastily explained what to do with her wet clothes.

“I’ll get you some more from your bag,” she said, hurrying out of the bathroom and shutting the door.

Alone, she spun in a circle. Her mind was whirling uncharacteristically fast, and the relief that blossomed in her chest to know that El was back and safe was all-encompassing. 

And she had broken up with her boyfriend…

Max ignored that thought and went to find El some clean clothes.  El took a while in the shower, and Max grew so agitated that she decided to turn on her tiny portable radio. It crackled to life, and pumped out a fizzy pop song tinged with a static hum.

“Max?” El called from inside her bathroom. “Clothes?”

“Right,” Max said, and practically threw out her neck looking away from the inside of the bathroom as she handed them in. Then she slammed the door shut and sat down on her bed.

Neither of them had boyfriends. She was really trying to not think about it, but it was building to a fuzzy, warm point inside her chest.

El came out in a cloud of steam, looking slightly less pale and drawn. Her cheeks were a little flushed, at least. Her eyes looked unfocused, though.

“Do you feel better?” Max said. “Do you want some food, or?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Max sprung to her feet, and El’s eyes tracked her across the bedroom. “Okay. One second.”

She dashed downstairs, grabbing some random chips and sodas and a bag of chocolate chips she had stored behind the oatmeal. Nothing seemed more important than making sure El had something to eat just then.

When she came back in, El was sitting in the middle of Max’s bed, staring at the wall.

“Sorry, I just grabbed some stuff. If you want a real dinner we can go back downstairs.”

El shook her head. Max deposited her goods in front of her, like she was presenting her offerings to an alter, and El ripped open the chip bag without a moment’s hesitation.

Max balanced herself on the edge of the bed, a leg tucked under her, and watched as El demolished half the bag. Then, she handed her a coke and watched her chug it in three sips. She handed the empty can back to Max.

“Better?” Max asked.

El nodded.

Max tugged at a thread on her shorts. “I broke up with Lucas, today, too.”

“I know,” El practically whispered. 

“Oh.” Max didn’t ask how she could possibly know that. She stared at the chocolate chips. “Well, single girls club.”

“Do you think he’s crying right now?”

“Who? Mike?” Max wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t really imagine Mike crying. “Maybe. Do you… want him to be?”

“No!” El said, quickly. “No!” 

“I mean, did he hurt your feelings? Or did you break up with-”

“He didn’t do anything,” El said, her voice hard. “Not at all.”

“Right.”

“You broke up with Lucas,” El said, suddenly accusatory. Max held up her hands in surrender.

“Yeah, but- well, you and Mike seemed fine.”

“We were!”

“Right.” Max rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, I’m just confused. You don’t have to explain anything.”

“I want to explain it, though,” El said, and again her voice had that hard-edged tone, but with a thread of desperation. Max looked back at her in surprise, and El was staring at her with her signature intensity. “I want… you to get it.”

“Okay.”

El scooted closer on the bed, like she was going to tell her a secret, but all she did was stare.

“I broke up with Mike because I was… guilty.” El bit her lip. “I was ashamed.”

“Did you do something to hurt Mike?”

“Yes!” El said, and continued to stare at Max as if the answer was going to fall into her head.

“And the something was…?”

El’s face fell. “Max,” she said, as if incredibly disappointed.

Max nodded, and smiled, and El scooted even closer. Max was growing uncomfortably warm from the closeness between them. She cast her attention to anything that was  _ not  _ El’s pink lips and soft eyes.

The radio played a sharp guitar lead-in, with drums kicking up behind. Max knew the song. The silence between them stretched like taffy in the sun.

“Do you like this song?” Max asked, randomly.

“What?”

“This song.”

“I’ve never heard it.” El didn’t even seem like she was listening to it, too focused on staring at Max.

“It’s funny,” Max said. “When I first heard it I thought the chorus was,  _ I just wanna be your lover, girl. _ Like, a pause. Instead of just _lovergirl_.”

What was she even saying? Was this supposed to make her feel less like blushing?

The chorus hit, and Max sang along, basically at a whisper. “ _ I just wanna be- your- lover, girl. _ ”

El leaned over and pressed her lips to Max’s.

Whoa. Whoa. This was unexpected. This was very unexpected. Max was all of a sudden dizzyingly lost in a sea of affirmations, thinking,  _ Yes, her lips are soft, yes, it turns out they are. This whole time. I was right, her lips were soft. _

El quietly opened her mouth against Max’s, and it was like nothing ever experienced by any person in the world, ever. It was like laying in the sun after a long time being cold. It was like flying, probably better. It felt like every warm and honeyed and sweet moment of Max’s life.

So she kissed her. The best she could do with basically no practice. She bobbed her head and knocked her nose into El’s by accident, and she was a little loose with her tongue, but El touched her hair and Max wanted to explode.

When  _ she  _ touched El, it was a revelation, because  _ of course  _ her hair was as soft as Max had imagined. So she ran her hands through it, accidentally clacking her teeth against El’s. 

Max broke away and pushed herself off of El, thus pushing herself off the bed. She sort of tried to catch herself, but then decided not to at the last second and let herself fall onto the ground with a flump.

Her first thought: maybe if she pretended to be dead El would forget what had just happened.

“Max!” El cried, her voice sweet and concerned, and it filled Max with such a guilt that she popped right back up. She stood, and she and El were basically face to face again.

“You-” Max stammered, and stopped because she couldn’t think of what came next. El’s lips were looking more pink than they a had a minute ago, because Max had just  _ kissed her _ . “Jesus, El, what was that?”

El looked at her. Her hair was rumpled.  _ Max had rumpled her hair.  _ “I thought… we kissed.”

“W- yes, w-” Max was having an increasingly hard thinking of what to fucking say. “El!”

“Yes?” El looked confused, and upset.

“Friends don’t just- they don’t just kiss each other!”

El laughed, and God Max just wanted to kiss her again. She loved her weird canine teeth, and the way her cheeks scrunched up. She wanted to kiss her all over her face, softly, and- 

OKAY THAT WAS AN UNPRECEDENTED THOUGHT. No more thinking.

“El,” Max said, and her voice cracked.

“Yes?”

She was so desperate. And she wanted to do this. But El was looking at her like this was  _ normal _ , and El didn’t  _ know  _ what it meant, and she couldn’t know… 

El had probably never heard the word “dyke”. El was something that should be looked at with softness and love, and Max couldn’t imagine how terribly unfair it would be for someone to hate her because of who she held hands with.

Max wasn’t going to let her confuse love and friendship and throw her life away.

“El, you’re not a lesbian.”

El looked at her, squinting. “I’m…”

“You’re only supposed to kiss  _ boys _ , dumbass,” Max said, sort of trying to play it off as a joke. She smiled, and she knew it looked manic, but she had to convince her. Sweet El. Confused El, who was making a huge mistake. “Girls like boys. Only.”

El’s eyes grew big, and Max saw real pain there. “What do you mean?”

“Only lesbians like girls. And they’re… didn’t anyone ever tell you about queers?”

El gaped at her. “Max.”

“They’re not normal, El.” Max swallowed, feeling slightly like she might throw up. “It’s really different from friendship. You get it?”

“I like you,” El said, apparently undeterred.

“No you don’t!” Max laughed, a high and panicked whine.

“You like  _ me _ ,” El protested. “You kissed me.”

“As a joke,” Max said, quickly.

El screwed her face up, and Max was worried she was going to cry, so she leaned over and touched her shoulder. “It’s okay,” Max said. “You were just upset over Mike. It’s okay.”

“It’s  _ not  _ okay, Max!” All of a sudden, El threw her hand off her and glowered up at Max. With no warning, she reached up and grabbed Max’s face in both hands.

Max was terrified she would kiss her again, because she knew if she did she would never stop. She would die, at thirteen, with her hands in El’s hair and their lips pressed together. But El didn’t kiss her. She just held her there.

“Max,” El whispered. 

And that was all she said. Then she stood up, let Max go, and stalked past her out the door. Max ran after her, and watched from the top of the staircase as she curled up on the couch.

Max walked back into her room.

She closed the door.

She began to cry. It was strange, because she hardly even noticed that she had started until she could feel the top of her shirt getting wet. The bed was still warm with El- the radio played on. Max stood up and switched it off. Then she switched the lights off. Then she got into bed.

Kissing El was the best thing that had happened in her whole life so far, and this moment was the worst.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok this one was definitely the longest and if you got through it all I am impressed  
> Obviously the song from the title (Lovergirl by Teena Marie) appears in this one. I remember listening to it before season three dropped and thinking 'is that gay?' Then they decided to put it in the scene with El and Max and I was like '!!!!' so I couldn't not put it in. Anyway, the end is nigh so hang in there. Also, seriously thanks for reading.


	10. El

El didn’t sleep, but she laid on Max’s couch all night and fizzed with the knowledge that Max was stupid and annoying and she never wanted to see her again. This was borne with a distinct certainty in El’s mind, and she was not going to let that thought go until Max apologized.

She wanted to leave.

She wanted to  _ hide _ . Max’s eyes on her, fear-flecked and strange, were too much to bear right now, and El needed to be gone. So when dawn came through the window, she got up and climbed the stairs, quietly.

Max’s room was dark, and she was laying on the bed, unmoving. El had no doubt that she was awake but she prayed for Max to continue to pretend as she gathered her bag and her wet clothes and snuck down the stairs again. Her shoes were outside, and they were still wet, so El took her socks off and walked barefoot down Max’s front steps. She did not look back as she headed for the woods.

El had felt it. In the moment when they kissed, she knew that she and Max were like her and Mike. In some ways, she could almost imagine they were even better. The kiss had lit something electric in her chest, and she realized that all the times Mike kissed her in her cabin he was chasing  _ this  _ feeling, this dizzying and dazzling feeling. 

Then Max had pulled away, and made her face into a smile and started talking to El about feelings and queers and wrongness, all the while looking at El’s lips like she was going to start crying. El wasn’t stupid. Not about this- she knew it. All this time, she had been confusing Max. She thought she was angry at her, that she didn’t like her, but she was realizing that it was all a mask that Max could duck behind, a convenient wall to take cover.

Because Max was a  _ coward. _

El never wanted to see her again.

By the time she reached her cabin her feet were throbbing so badly she could barely stand, forced to carry her long distances in miserable circumstances twice in two days. She was relieved to collapse onto her own couch, even if the cabin was empty and she didn’t like how dusty and weird it felt to be in there. Maybe now she could get some sleep.

She only had a few minutes of peace, though, because pretty soon someone was banging angrily on her front door. El jumped up (it could be Hop, somehow discovering her escape from Max’s and returned) but when she opened it there was Will. 

He was flushed, and at first El didn’t recognize him because the Will she knew was always pale and shrinking, but he was red and heaving now. His eyes burned her, like all the sadness in them had suddenly sharpened into something dangerous.

He pointed at her. “What the fuck did you do?”

This confused El further, because she had never heard Will curse like that, and had never been an object of his hate.

“El!” he shouted, his voice scraping like it took all his effort to build to his volume. “What did you  _ do _ to him?”

El realized, as she should’ve before, that this was about Mike.

“Do you even get what breaking up means?” Will asked. His voice was poisonous. He looked like he might start crying, he was so full of emotion. “Did it cross your mind that that’s the kind of shit that  _ really hurts _ someone? Or are you too stupid to even understand that?”

He paused, and El tried, “Will-”

“You can’t just  _ do that _ , Eleven! He loved you!”

“I-”

“And you’re an ungrateful piece of shit for it, and I wish he’d left you in the fucking woods!”

They stared at each other. Will was panting, and El realized that his collapsed bike was sunk halfway in the mud in front of the steps. He biked here, probably directed from Max’s when he found she wasn’t there.

El waited, to see if Will would speak again, but he just stared at her. He challenged her, like she could respond to him at all. At last, she said, “Will. Why are you upset?”

“Because you broke up with my best friend! I’m supposed to be upset! Like you’re supposed to be dating Mike right now!” 

El was a little taken aback. To be honest, she was confused. All the things that had become clear to her last night (Max and Will and Mike and Max and Max and Max) were being contradicted here.

“But don’t…” and El paused, not wanting Will to go blank-eyed and accusatory like Max, but also wanting to understand. “Don’t you love him?”

Will went completely still, like he was trying to not be heard or seen. His eyes became saucers, his mouth a pinched flower. 

They stood there, a silence stretching over them like the clouds over the sun.

“El,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

El watched him, and licked her lips nervously. He was now staring at a point on the wooden slats of the porch, a spot where Mike had probably kissed her. Again, the moments stretched. Birds called from far away.

“Would you prefer I not say anything?”

Will remained frozen, but his mouth moved, like he was a wooden puppet instead of a boy. His voice was so quiet that El barely heard him. “Does he know?”

“I don’t think so.”

Will looked like he was on fire, but couldn’t move. “What do- he- is that why?”

El shook her head.

Will walked inside. She didn’t have to invite him in; she let him pass and then shut the door against the wet air. Will dropped himself onto her couch, still rigid in his face and body. She didn’t move from the door right away, but then decided she was hungry and went to the fridge.

“I’m getting an Eggo,” she said. No response. El took one right from the box and started to eat it frozen.

Walking back into the room, she realized that Will was crying. It was so quiet. It almost looked like his eyes had spilled, as if on some accident, and he hadn’t bothered to wipe them up. He still looked forward, blank.

“How long have you known?” Will asked. In this room, his whisper cut through the dust. 

“Since yesterday.”

“How?”

El tried to explain, but found that she didn’t really have an answer to that question. She ended up saying, lamely, “I just knew.”

“Right.” Will finally swiped at his eyes and sniffed. “And it had nothing to do with-”

“No.”

Will looked around at her, and she took another bite of her waffle. His eyes were still sort of angry, but it was crumpled. “Why did you do that?” he asked. “He’s really… he’s really upset.”

El shifted, uncomfortable with his attention. “I was guilty.”

“Why?”

“Because I started… I wanted to kiss someone else.”

Will’s eyes went wide, and El hurried to add, “it happened fast. Just this summer. I had never… not before…”

“I can’t believe you would do that to him!”

“I didn’t want to!” El yelped. “I wanted to love him, only. But, I just…”

She braced herself for Will to hurl his abuse at her, but all he did was sort of deflate.

“You didn’t want to hurt him any further,” Will summarized, and El nodded, miserable. “It makes sense. I don’t  _ get  _ it, but it makes sense.” He tilted his head. “Don’t tell me it was one of our friends.”

El bit her lip.

“Are you kidding me?”

“We had never spent time together, before! I told you, in was so recent, so soon after I moved in…”

She gave him a meaningful look, hoping he’d put the pieces together. His eyes widened.

“You’re in love with Max’s boyfriend?” he said. “Does she know? Does Lucas know? I can’t believe it, El, you-”

“Not her  _ boyfriend _ !” 

His eyebrows furrowed. “ _Billy_?” he asked, tentatively.

“Max.”

They stared at each other, again lost to the silence. Will looked completely blown away, as if El couldn’t have said anything more shocking.

“El, I had no idea,” he said, finally. “I just… so you broke up with him because you’re a lesbian.”

El grimaced. “No.”

“No?”

“I loved Mike,” El explained. “And now I love her. I love her?” She thought about the words. She hadn’t thought about it in such extreme terms, but she couldn’t think of anything more fitting. She did love her, her laugh and her hair, and her looks of surprise and her looks of passion. Funny-Max. Everything-Max. She loved her. It was a warm, powerful feeling.

Will clearly didn’t understand, but she knew he wasn’t going to ask anything more. He just looked at her.

“I didn’t think we were the same,” he said. “If I’d known-”

“I didn’t know,” El said. “Not until I kissed her.”

Will’s eyes, which she did not think could get any wider, widened. “You  _ kissed _ her?” he squeaked.

“She kissed me back.”

“You  _ kissed _ ?”

El shrugged, and Will looked like he wanted to slap her, so she supplied, “I had come back from Mike, and we sat on her bed, and she sang to me, and we kissed.” El frowned. “Then she called me confused and now I can never see her again.”

Will suddenly looked at her like she was being ridiculous. “You had just broken up with your boyfriend.”

“What?”

Will shrugged. “You came back from your boyfriend’s house, and suddenly you’re all over Max. That’s confusing.”

El was surprised he wasn’t taking her side. “But I kissed her.”

“She probably thought you had gone crazy from losing him, or something.” Will covered his face with his hands and groaned. “I can’t believe I’m talking to you about kissing Max. That is not what I came here to do.”

“What did you come here for?”

“To tell you off for being a bitch and making Mike cry.”

El shrugged. “I did  _ you _ a favor. He’ll get over me.”

“You kissed _one_ girl and now you think every person is okay with suddenly being gay.”

He sounded, all at once, pained again. El snorted. “Mike would kiss you. He’s alive around you. Like you’re a match.”

Will looked at her with sudden ferocious intensity.  _ “What? _ ”

“When he’s with you he’s happy.” El shrugged, helpless to explain. “I don’t know what that means. But with me he was… gruff. Not real Mike.”

“And you think  _ I- _ ”

“I’m not Mike!”

Will crawled over the back of her couch and went to stand in front of her. “So, if I… he would…?”

He left so much unsaid that El was lost, but she said, “I can’t tell you what would happen. But I think he loves you. Maybe not in the way you love him.”

Will pursed his lips, though El knew that didn’t make sense. She grabbed his shoulders, and he was nearly pushed over. “You’ll have to know.”

Will nodded, then, and looked all of a sudden hopeful. It was so strange to see it blooming on his face that El just watched him.

“What about you?” Will asked her, quietly. “Will you tell her?”

El frowned. “I did. She didn’t want me.”

“Oh. I thought you just kissed her.”

“That was me telling her.”

Will broke away from her, groaning. “Eleven. That’s not a love proclamation.”

“It’s not?” Maybe she should warn him what to expect from Mike. 

“No wonder she thought you were… experimenting or something. That is very unclear and scary, to just kiss someone at random.”

It always seemed to work in movies and TV though. El decided not to mention it. “What’s the right thing to do?”

“Say the words. I like you, I love you, let’s go out. She can’t read minds.” Will looked at her like Hopper would have when he disapproved, and it was so familiar that El couldn’t help but smile. 

“What if she says no?”

Will inhaled. “Then she says no. I guess we’re both going to have to be brave today.”

“Today?”

“El, I’m not letting you get away with this. We’re going to find her right now.” Will wiped his face again, vigorously, and grinned. “And then I’m going to tell Mike Wheeler that I love him!” His face fell. “That sounded really stupid. Never let me say something like that again.”

El hugged him, then, tightly. Her Will. Her imaginary-life brother, with his floppy hair and sad eyes and enormous well of strength. “You’re never stupid,” she whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more to go!   
> Also, before we go on I have to mention that Will/Mike is not confirmed in this since the story's not about them, but they 100% end up together.


	11. Max

Max heard her come in. She knew she was getting her stuff- that much was obvious- but she couldn’t make herself get up. There was a rolling, hard feeling in her stomach, and she really wanted to pop up and say “El, I’m sorry, I was wrong, let’s forget it ever happened.”

But she didn’t.

Eventually, El left the room, and Max pressed her face into the pillow and wished she could drown.

She didn’t want to get out of bed at all, but after the sun had risen further and her mother had called her, meekly, three times for breakfast, she was struck with a sudden, visceral hatred towards Robin. Robin had made her impulsive and stupid. Robin was the reason that El had broken up with her boyfriend and decided to kiss Max- one look in her judgemental blue eyes and El was lost.

Max threw her covers off angrily, and found a bra and put it on angrily. Once she got started, she found that she could do a lot angrily: brush her teeth, braid her hair, put her shoes on, say goodbye to her mom. She then angrily rolled her bike out the back and angrily took off towards the mall.

It was weird to ride with El on back, like her weight had been reconfigured and she was suddenly lighter than expected. She barely even noticed the scenery, or the strain of her muscles as she rode down. She was just thinking about that, trying to adjust to the absence of a girl that never should have been there in the first place.

She wished she and El had never become friends. That would make all this so much easier.

The mall was practically empty when she showed up, which was weird but not important. She stormed up the escalator.

Robin wasn’t working the register for once, which was annoying but not abnormal. Steve was standing there, looking ridiculous in his little sailboat hat, his eyes droopy like he just woke up.

“Hey!” Steve said, looking like he recognized her but couldn’t put a face to the name, which didn’t surprise her. Max ignored him and rammed through the doors to the back room.

Robin was sitting there, staring at some book, and she glanced up in surprise when Max said, “some advice you gave me yesterday.”

“Hey, you can’t come back here,” Steve said, coming in after her, but Robin shooed him off with one hand.

“I know her,” she said. She leaned forward. “What do you mean? Did she reject you?”

Max shot a look at Steve, who looked cowed and backed into the other room. Robin fixed her gaze on Max, and she looked pitying, like that could change anything.

“She didn’t reject me, you piece of shit,” Max practically spat. “She kissed me.”

Robin sat back. “Oh. Okay?”

“What do you mean  _ okay _ ?”

“Did it not go well?” Robin asked. She lowered her eyebrows conspiratorially. “Was she bad?”

“Of course not!” 

“Then what’s the issue?”

Max gaped at her. “Because! She obviously doesn’t actually  _ like  _ me!”

Robin snorted. “You felt it in her kiss, right? It’s actually depressing that a thirteen-year-old is getting more action than me right now.”

Max was disappointed that Robin was being so flippant. Apparently she didn’t understand at all what was the worst and most clear realization of Max’s life. She threw her hands down on the table.

“She kissed me because she was confused! Because I confused her, and she was sad because she broke up with her boyfriend, and I was singing some stupid song…” Max put her head down and moaned into the table. “She doesn’t understand what it means to be…”

“A dyke?” Robin said, casually, and Max flinched up like she’d taken a swing at her. “Listen. You’re young, and I guess your only other relationship was bullshit, but a very important lesson about love and people in general…” and here Robin leaned in, mock-whispering, “you don’t actually get to decide what someone else’s feelings are.”

Max glowered. “I know that.”

“Okay, so I’m hearing that a girl kissed you and you enjoyed it and now you’ll have some ice cream and go back to live happily ever after with her.” She tilted her head and amended,“the gay approximate.”

“You don’t know about this girl.”

“I don’t.”

“She was, like,  _ really  _ sheltered. She barely knows what a regular, boy-girl relationship is.”

Robin shrugged. “Let her figure that out.”

Max spluttered. “That could ruin her life! She doesn’t- she could be really hurt by that- like her future…”

Robin leaned over and touched Max’s arm. “If you think you need to explain the risk, fine. But don’t automatically assume she’s using you just because you can’t believe she reciprocates.”

Max would have said something, then, and she wasn’t sure if it would be to argue or not, but there was suddenly a commotion in the front part of the shop. Max heard Steve say, “hey, Jesus, no running!” and then “wait, aren’t you, like, not supposed to be here?”

“Is she here?” said someone, and Max almost thought it was Will. Like, sad Will, sounding like he’d run up four flights of stairs to get there.

“Robin? Why do all these kids know  _ Robin _ ?” 

Robin stood up and flung the door open, saying, “I don’t know him,” and Max saw through the open door that Will and  _ El  _ were standing there, both looking completely wiped out. Neither saw her- Will sank into a nearby chair, and El looked at Robin like she was going to say something. Max actually wasn’t sure if Robin was going to sell her out, and so she stood up and came out beside Robin.

Her heart was beating so loud and fast that she was barely able to hear herself saying, “El. You were gone this morning.”

She was attempting to steer the conversation in a half-normal direction; no matter what Robin had told her, there was no fucking way Max was going to declare her obsession off-hand. 

“I love you,” El said, in response.

Dead silence. It was a good thing that there were no real customers in the store, and Max was pretty sure she trusted Steve to keep his mouth shut, and Will was looking enthusiastically proud, because otherwise Max would have turned tail and ran. The only reason she didn’t was because Robin was looking at her like she was going to grab her shirt and anchor her in place.

Max said, “eerhch.”

Something like that.

Whatever sound it was that came out of her mouth, it was more of a squawk than a word. Max’s face went hot and undefined, and it was unclear to her whether or not she was standing or floating. 

“I love you, and I know what that means,” El said. “I didn’t tell you last night. I thought you knew.”

Max tried to focus on getting herself back inside her body. “Why are you telling me this in Scoops Ahoy?” she squeaked.

“Yeah, what is going on here?” Steve added, and Robin must have jabbed him because he recoiled dramatically.

“Then let’s go,” El said, and she held out her hand. She was blushing, not as much as Max but in a delicate, pleasant way, and she looked expectant. What was Max supposed to do? She catapulted herself forward and grabbed her hand.

Then they were running, together. El’s feet were fast along the lineuleum as they ran out of the shop and down the hallway. Max didn’t pay attention to where they were going until El had shut the bathroom door behind them.

“Max,” she said, and then she was  _ kissing her against the door of the bathroom.  _ Like she and Max were the romantic leads in some cheesy movie. Even though when a guy did it, in the movies, it seemed like an undelicate slam, violent and uninhibited, there was no loss of sweetness as El kissed her. She was still holding one of Max’s hands, and the other she petted Max’s head with, tangling her fingers there. Max, without thinking, put her hands up to rest on her waist, and they were kissing for real. Like, easily and sweetly and carelessly. No awkwardness, no chaos, just  _ El. _

And she said she loved her.

Abruptly, Max broke away. “Wait, what? What’s going on?”

El looked at her, and then away, suddenly bashful, as if she hadn’t just been kissing her with no abandon. “I think we should be dating.”

“Like you and Mike?”

“Like you and  _ me _ ,” El clarified. “Let’s go out. We can get ice cream. And we can go to my cabin. And we can go to the pool. Let’s hold hands.”

“We shouldn’t hold hands in public,” Max suggested. “People might… think badly of us.”

From El’s look, she could tell that she knew what Max was talking about. “I don’t care.”

“But you’re not a lesbian,” Max said. Then, remembering Robin, she said, “are you?”

El shrugged. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Max replied, so fast that she had no time to think it over. She had thought it over, before, though. She had thought about how she probably should have figured that out a long time ago. “But you’re not.”

“I love you.”

Max wrinkled her nose. “It’s too early to say ‘I love you’. You have to wait to say it.”

“Forget I said it, and I’ll wait,” El said, and she smiled wide and she kissed her again, and Max felt radiantly good. She reached one hand to touch El’s cheek. Her skin was soft, and Max found herself so blissful over the fact that she was hers, then. El was hers, and Max was El’s. No fact on the whole history of the planet could be more incredible.

El pulled away, breathless. “What do you say?”

Max realized she meant dating- she realized she’d never given an answer. She didn’t think, but she didn’t need to. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Please date me.”

El grinned. “I will.”

“Good.” Max tilted her head again, and she was starting to wonder if this would ever get old. Being with her. Standing with their mouths together. 

“I thought I knew what it meant,” El said, suddenly, practically against Max’s mouth. 

“What?”

“Eternal,” El said, and Max laughed because it had come out of nowhere.

“Why are you thinking about that right now?”

El looked at her, cheeks flushed, dark eyes wide and radiant and fixed on her. “You make me want to say it.”

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay! That is the end of the very first fan fiction I have ever written! It’s been a really fun time figuring out how to write this and it’s super super neat that people actually read it. If you’re reading this end note, thanks!  
> I actually do have another story I’m writing, but it is vastly different and a lot weirder. Anyway, catch you on the flip side! And thank you! :)


End file.
